2010 Targa Newfoundland is under way

The 2010 Targa Newfoundland got underway at 9:30 this morning. Stuck here in Ontario, it has taken me until 9 pm Eastern time to get results and images to go along with this story. It would seem that details are going to come slowly this week! I got info out of Mexico faster!

That pumpkin up above belongs to close friend of The Garage, Crash Corrigan. I was supposed to be on The Rock acting as his crew chief, but sadly that just wasn’t in the cards. On the positive side, the Pumpkin is still shiny side up, unlike some of our other friends.

I awoke this morning to a somewhat disgruntled message from Crash, explaining how a class of 3 Targa rookies had been crashed by a class winner and a multiple overall winner, after registration had closed. It would seem that organizers were not happy with the open class being populated by only 3 cars. Fortunately, at the end of the day, our man Crash has not lived up to his name and is still on the road, in 4th place in class.
Open class is currently being led by past overall winner Roy Hopkins who has traded his time worn BMW for a factory built “Vintage” Dodge Dart Demon. Next up is another friend of The Garage, Jim Kenzie, in the rather quick Euro market MINI. Herb Wong in an BMW E30 M3 sits in 3rd. Another friend of The Garage, Mike Louli, turned some roadside trees into firewood with his Subaru, while a VW GTI and another MINI also DNF’d.

Tomorrow is another day. The Louli gang is hard at work straightening out the Surbaru while Crash leaves us with the following quote:Back in the 70’s, Ford Escorts used to eat Minis for breakfast, and I think mine’s suddenly come over a little peckish!

The following photos are courtesy of local photographer Todd Baker. They were actually taken yesterday during the Prologue section of the event, which is essentially a high speed shake down. We have more images to come tomorrow from Todd’s brother Robert.